I Call Bullshit

It happened. A few days ago I was reading the newspaper in the morning, like I do every morning.  But that day, I read through the entire front page section and when I got to the back page, there it was-- a story about the latest school shooting. On the back page.

Apparently school shootings do not merit front page coverage anymore.  No wonder. There have been twenty-three school shootings in 2018--and it's only June 5. TWENTY-THREE! That's approximately one school shooting per week.

Last week there was an official who blamed school shootings on all of the following: ritalin, the number of doors schools have, and godlessness. But not guns. Seriously.

A friend of mine who is an artist created a piece that has stuck with me. She made it in the wake of Trump's election. At the top of the work are the words 'What Now?' Underneath the words is an outline of the United States, and it is filled in with comments written by people attending the SF Women's March, which was days after Trump's inauguration.

What now, indeed.

I think it is safe to say that our country is in crisis. We have kids being shot by their classmates. Weekly. And nothing is being done. The shootings are horrible. The inaction is inexcusable.

I watched a press conference a few days ago at which a young man (probably twelve years old) described to Sarah Sanders the fear that he and other kids feel going to school with so many school shootings happening, and unable to control her emotion, she somewhat tearfully apologized to the boy, saying that school should be a place where kids feel safe every day, and she feels awful that he feels afraid. But then she followed that up with the statement that the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to solve the problem. Tell me, Sarah, what exactly is the Trump administration doing? As Emma Gonzalez says, I call bullshit.

Twenty years have passed since Columbine.

Who would have thought that event was just the beginning? That very first school shooting brought to light the issues of students being bullied, mental illness, semi-automatic weapons, and kids having access to guns.

Twenty years have passed since Columbine.

This country has quite literally done nothing to address three out of those four problems. And while credit is due for bullying being brought out into the open and identified as a serious matter, in the time it's taken to do that social media has blown up and bullying has morphed into something that now occurs 24/7 for some kids.

We have done nothing noteworthy on the mental illness front.
We have undone what progress was made regarding the availability of semi-automatic weapons.
We have done nothing significant about kids having access to guns.

Why? Why have we not solved--no, I'm not going to finish that sentence. I'm going to restart it.
Why can't we at least agree on what the problems are?